Albert
Ballin (1857-1918, pronounced as in Marleen) was the youngest of thirteen
siblings. He was born in Hamburg of a Jewish family which had immigrated
there from Denmark. His father, Samuel Joseph (1804-1874), had founded a
travel agency in Hamburg in 1852. That travel agency was mostly
concerned with emigrants seeking to go to America. Upon the death of his
father in 1874, Albert, then only 17 years old, took over his
father's business. Consequently he became a partner in another travel
agency called Morris & Co. which was also engaged in the
emigration business to England and America. In 1881, Morris & Co.
began to represent the Carr Line which later united with this Sloman
Line. Together with yet other shipping companies, these formed the
Hamburg Amerika Paket Aktien Gesellshaft, or HAPAG, which became the
largest shipping company in Europe under the direction of Albert
Ballin.

It
was Ballin who developed the first so-called middle passage on all
long-distance passenger ships, which made it cheaper for emigrants to
travel. In fact, Ballin wrote that “without the middle passage I
would be bankrupt within a few weeks.” In 1887, Ballin promoted he
rapid passenger service Hamburg-New York and subsequently developed
the HAPAG to such an extent that the company was able to build the then
largest and fastest ships in the world. In fact, in 1900, the Deutschland
won the blue ribbon for the fastest ship ever. In 1906, the
biggest ship in the world was put into service. It was called Kaiserin
Augusta Victoria or Empress Augusta Victoria. In 1912 the Imperator
followed. All this came to the attention of the German Emperor or
Kaiser (Caesar).

It
was in that year in that Ballin developed Ballinstadt, which
consisted of 30 separate buildings devoted to the comfort of Eastern
European Jews seeking to migrate to America. Included were separate
buildings for sleeping accommodations, several baths, and eating
accommodations, as well as rooms for medical examinations. The
purpose of Ballinstadt was to allow emigrants who waited for
transportation to America an opportunity to live in a secure place.

Although
Ballin was so successful in business and a well-known philanthropist as
well, Hamburg society would not accept him because he was a Jew. This was
despite the fact that the Emperor of Germany, Kaiser Wilhelm II, not
only visited Ballin but also invited him repeatedly to his palace in
Potsdam, a suburb of Berlin. There, too, the Kaiser's underlings snubbed Ballin
as a Jew. The Kaiser himself was also a Jew baiter, but, like all bigots,
he found one Jew, in this case Ballin, to be an exception. After all, even
Hitler exempted his mother's Jewish doctor from murder on the grounds that
he had alleviated her suffering from cancer.

Shortly
before the outbreak of the First World War, Ballin used his international
contacts to prevent the fighting which finally erupted anyway. After
the war began, Ballin made every effort to prevent the entrance of the
United States into the war bur failed in this as well. After the war
was over he was asked by the German government to discuss peace with the
allies, which he did. However, at the total defeat of Germany, and
its surrender on November 11, 1918, Ballin viewed his life as having been
destroyed and therefore poisoned himself to death.

Today
a street in Hamburg is named after him, as is a building at
Feldbrunnerstasse #58. Ballin died a suicide because he could not tolerate
the defeat of a Germany which never really accepted him and which after
him became the graveyard of his people.

Walther
Rathenau (1867-1922, pronounced as in cart a now) was born the son of a
prominent Jewish businessman in Berlin. His father had been the founder of
an electrical engineering company. Walther studied physics, chemistry
and philosophy at the University of Berlin and worked as an engineer
before joining the board of directors of his father's company in 1899. Prominent
in the German Empire before the First World War, he urged German Jews to
assimilate, to give up Judaism, to oppose Zionism and to integrate
themselves into German society, policies which he believed would lead
to the end of anti-Jewish hatred. This attitude did not save him from
being caricatured by the German anti-Jewish movement as the archetypical
Jewish capitalist.

During
the First World War, Rathenau held senior posts in the raw materials
department of the War Ministry. Upon his father's death in 1915 he became
chairman of the Allgemeine Eletricitäts Gesellschaft. He
became the leading figure in putting Germany's economy on a war footing
and enabling Germany to continue its war effort for four years despite
acute shortages of labor and raw materials.

After
the First World War Rathenau became one of the founders of the German
Democratic Party. In 1921, upon the resignation of the Kaiser,
a new democratic German government appointed him minister of
reconstruction and in 1922 he became foreign minister. He wanted
Germany to fulfill its obligations under the Treaty of Versailles. This,
and particularly because he was a Jew, angered German nationalists
immensely. They claimed that he was part of a Jewish-Communist conspiracy,
and so, on June 24, 1922, Rathenau was murdered by two army officers.

He,
like Ballin, died an unnatural death. Both fervently believed that Germany
was their Fatherland and that eventually the Jews of that country would
have a glorious future there. Neither of them knew how wrong they were.
Yet, none of us have a right to second guess them now, for no one foresaw
the Holocaust. Furthermore, even during and after the Holocaust, the
American Jewish community refused to help the German Jews during the
peacetime years 1933-1941 when that was still possible. Instead, American
Jews totally rejected the few German Jews who survived and labeled these
immigrants with the same opprobrium, such as arrogant, self seeking and
pushy, as had the German haters whom they had just escaped.